A blog of published editorial ( Tatler, Mail on Sunday, Life Magazine, Londoncalling.com and more.) Some behind the scenes shots from fashion shoots, travel and lifestyle articles and images. This blog written by me - Sara Colohan. I work in London as a writer and producer of London's longest running cabaret company Cirque du Cabaret. I am also a huge raw food fan and have started a company called londonmaker.com A social enterprise where people learn, teach and produce plant-based treats.

4/9/12

A Road Less Travelled by Sara Colohan for Confetti (Bridal site/magazine)

There’s no arguing that Irish honeymoon couples are drawn to
Portugal’s Algarve region.
The Irish Travel Industry awarded it "Best Sun Destination’ at the
Industry Awards last year, leaving behind rivals including Costa del Sol, Florida
and Lanzarote. Most of us go there for its close proximity, reliable sunshine, world
class golf (if golf is a shared passion on your honeymoon!) and there’s no
shame in admitting it, we go because it’s cheap.

It would be ideal not to have to mention the world economic
downturn straight off but who are we kidding?If any country recognises the lean times we are facing here in Ireland its Portugal,
second only to our friends in Greece!
I checked out a lesser known side of the Algarve last September and
immediately felt like we were old friends sharing a common burden. But despite
our countries mirrored troubled economic states, the Algarve is still a fine destination
for a frugal honeymoon frolic in the sun.

Praia De Faro

Like a lot of great relationships, my romance with Portugal didn’t
hit a high straight away! I flew into Faro for a planned three night stay but
immediately changed my mind when I saw the cheerless, dated landscape of the gaudy
retro tower blocks. Despite the fact that the city encompassed a historical 16th
century fort, both the old and new towns seemed depressingly dilapidated. The
good news is there are lots of gorgeous places to travel to, just a short drive
or a train journey away. That’s the beauty of the Algarve, it allows you travel at
very little cost and choose a relaxed or adventurous pace for your stay. If you
are counting the honeymoon pennies (who isn’t these days?) but you don’t want
to compromise on sunshine, then the Algarve is a strong contender. Let
me add that if you simply want to loll around on a gorgeous beach for your
entire stay, then full credit to Faro’s stunning main beach Praia De Faro. You could hire a beach side villa and enjoy daily barefoot
strolls along the full length of the peninsula, the mild waves lapping at your
toes. But I wanted a different kind of action, so after just one night in the
only seaside hotel Aeromar, I headed for the train station to start my
adventure.

Perhaps you won’t want to be faffing around with rental
cars, train tickets and maps but it is worth mentioning that if you feel like
an adventure, the rail transport system is ridiculously cheap. A mere seven
euro will take you across the country in about two hours! I joked if these
disproportionally low fares had contributed something towards Portugal’s calamitous economy as I seemed to remember
paying something close to that for a coffee on a Dublin
to Galway trip recently!

The Portuguese trains are stunning, reflective metal hulks
of engineering externally. Sadly they don’t reflect this splendour on the
inside but they’re reliable, clean and safe and after just one night in Faro, at
a modest trundle, I headed west towards the portal city of Lagos.

Reading a myriad of travel guides, it’s easy to deduce that Lagos is the best city the Algarve has to offer. I was keen to
see the famousred
cliffs I’d admired on travel programmes over the years and ogle the posh boats
moored in the famous port, but I also had another reason for
visiting this part of the country. In just two days time, I would be travelling
28kms west, deep into the protected Portuguese national reserve park of Aljezur
for a week long holistic horse riding holiday and before you roll your eyes and
think ‘what next?’ let me say I was a bit hesitant myself at first! Would I
really be doing yoga poses on a horse? Well, sort of…

After two fun days in Lagos
staying in the modern stylish surrounds of Villa Dinis, (private residents pool
and bar in every villa and great breakfast!) visiting the local markets and taking a boat trip
to see the resident dolphins (it’s as traditional and worthwhile as having a
Guinness in Ireland!)
I set off for Aljezur. With no direct public transport, I booked the riding
centre’s local taxi man Jose and after witnessing the winding steep climbs and
hair raising descents he had to navigate, I was glad I had decided against
hiring a car. You’d need to be a confident driver to manage this trip alone.

The Holistic Riding Center is adjoined
to MonteVelho which is a stylish sprawling yoga retreat set in a remote mountain
side, four kilometres from their nearest neighbour.

Monte Velho is not just a favourite of the
Portuguese wealthy set, it runs successful yoga courses and retreats for super Zen
yogis from all around the world. Despite its absolutely glorious remote location
(it boasts a private lake, horse and bike trails to the beach and the
surrounding forest, private villa type accommodation with your very own
hammock!) I have to admit I felt a bit lost during my stay simply because it didn’t
cater for me as a solo traveller. I hardly saw a receptionist or staff member
during my stay and there was simply a phone on the desk with a number to call
if you needed help! I started to pine for civilisation as I knew it after a day
or so!

I know that Mont Velho will be heaven on
earth for any of you chilled out, loved up yoga couples who wants total calm
and tranquillity with no interruptions (especially from staff!) free to roam
the surrounding protected forests, swim in the lake and generally be left to your
own devices, but it was just a little too remote for me!

I hadn’t really come for the yoga of course, I came for
holistic horse riding and after meeting the centres owner Andreas for a series
of rather bizarre but fun yoga poses in the middle of a field, I was introduced
to Karla, my horse for the first of our daily three hour treks. After a bit of
persuading, myself and the beautiful Karla eventually got along as we cantered
through wild forest trails and kicked up fine sand along the remote beaches. I
learned that these horses react differently to other horses I’d met over my
twenty years riding. I had to retrain the way I walked, held, fed, brushed and
tended a horse and somewhere inside me I knew that I was learning to nurture a
new perspective about horsemanship. I could also see Andreas had a deeper level
of understanding and love for his horses than I had seen anywhere before and it
was a joy to witness him at work for the few days I was there.

He told me that over the past 20 years, his fascination with wild horses and
the way they move and respond to humans had led him to develop this Holistic
Riding technique. He told me it’s more than just another style of riding, what
you learn seems to stay with you long after you get off the horse and I kind of
knew what he meant.
Mont Velho and Andreas’ Holistic Horse Centre work closely together on
programmes including horse work and yoga. There is lots of information on their
respective websites and they welcome couples with all levels of experience.

So, if random tales
of trains and automobiles, yoga and holistic horse riding can’t persuade you
off the well-worn Algarve
track, then maybe the promise of some of the world’s best surf could tempt an
active surf loving couple to visit Carrapateira,
my final destination on this trip.

Just four kilometres in
steep descent, this remote costal micro village is Mont Velho’s closest
neighbour. It has just one café, one grocery shop and one local taxi man called
Jose (yes the same Jose who brought from Lagos!)
but oddly enough, seems to lack nothing! Surrounded by hundreds of miles of pristine
beaches, friendly locals, turbo fast wi-fi, excellent coffee, chilled out
surfer dudes and dudettes, not to mention the glorious weather, it’s no wonder
the few guest houses in the area are booked out for months in advance of high
season. I though I might feel like a bit of an outsider as I’m not a surfer,
but I actually felt very at home among the miles of white sandy dunes, watching
all the student surfers dot about, relentlessly trying to outsmart the waves.

I stayed in Pensao
das Dunas and what it lacks in privacy for a honeymoon couple, (they have
one modest ‘honeymoon room’ but the rest are small and the walls are thin!) it
makes up for in hospitality, good conversation, kind gestures and legendary
breakfasts! This place is perfect for the sociable couple who wants to meet the
locals and fellow guests around the communal dinner table and chat late into
the night. It’s the best place to learn about the history of the area and you
can casually borrow the owners bikes (they have a tandem if you feel brave
enough!) or join co owner Eduardo for one of his infamous ‘short walks’ which
will probably end up being a 15km hike through some of the most breathtaking
costal scenery. (Think cliffs of Moher with beaming sunshine, warm clear water,
and visiting an occasional undiscovered beach) The hike I joined was beyond a doubt, the
highlight of my trip and amazingly there was no charge for the full day’s
adventure as Eduardo does them out of pure love for his homestead.

I appreciated hearing the passion and pride in the locals as
they spoke about keeping Carrapateira just as it is. You won’t see a building
more than two stories high for hundreds of miles as it’s virtually impossible
to get planning for new builds on the reserve. The visiting surfers, for the
most part, seem to respect the land and the remarkable beaches although I heard
talk of the threat from unruly Spanish visitors, marked as the worst culprits
for local environmental crimes.

For the most part, it looks like this perfect micro village
will remain just as it is, for us and hopefully for our generations to come.

Maybe we should all get familiar with it now and come back
year after year to see everything stay exactly the same…..

4/6/12

It amazed me that the majority of practitioners were content to work within the tradition of mimicking the natural habits of their animals. It probably helped that I am quite a competitive person and if I couldn’t do it better, I wanted to do it differently.

LC: As taxidermy is not, by any means a popular career choice, I’m fascinated and curious about your chosen path! What were your main influences or set of circumstances that led you to become a taxidermist?

Polly Morgan: It feels to me as though it was a confluence of apparently arbitrary choices I made leading up to and following on from my degree. I chose Queen Mary College as I was more keen on their focus on Modern Literature than the more traditional London University courses. This brought me to London’s East End, which in turn led to my taking a job at a bar in Shoreditch. All my influences could be found drinking or working here. The area was a hub for artists and I soaked everything up like a sponge. I’ve always been adventurous and have liked to try as much out as possible. Taxidermy was last in a long line of subjects I tried my hand out at in my early twenties.

LC: You are not a traditional taxidermist, as in you don’t try to charge your subjects with life and create startled looking versions of the original animal. Your affect is much more subtle and narrative. Did you make a conscious decision to ‘tone down’ taxidermy as we know it and salvage its dated, bad rep? What are your views on the more traditional style of taxidermy?

PM: I don’t feel that anything I’ve done has had such a clear motive as this; it has all been much more instinctive. I started by just making the things I wanted to own and I just found that much of the traditional work, beautiful though some of it is, lacked imagination. It amazed me that the majority of practitioners were content to work within the tradition of mimicking the natural habits of their animals. It probably helped that I am quite a competitive person and if I couldn’t do it better, I wanted to do it differently.

LC: Your works are unique, beautiful presentations yet with an undeniable morbid undertone, not least because we all know there is a lot of cutting, dismembering, pickling and freezing of body parts to achieve the final result. Does it ever make you queasy or on a deeper level do you ever feel you are dishonouring your subjects by displaying them after death?

PM: No. And I am quite adamant about that. I think that this argument is to foist human sentimentality onto creatures that are not much like us. They rarely mourn their dead, and frequently eat them. I tend to say that the worst thing I am doing by removing a dead animal from the chain is to deprive a crow of a meal.
The longer I have been doing this the more alien the idea that my work is morbid is to me. I have endless respect for the living, but I’m not sure it’s necessary to respect an inert object.

LC: It seems fitting that you have your studio in the historically soaked old East End of London as your work is heavily influenced by the past. Your first exhibition, held to much acclaim in Bistroteque had Victorian influences, the next Psychopomps was influenced by Greek Mythology. Can you give us an insight into your new exhibition 'Endless Plains' and what inspired it?

PM: It was inspired by a trip last summer to the Serengeti (which translates in English as Endless Plains) and my subsequent hospitalisation & near death when my appendix burst and I developed gangrene and peritonitis. The landscape was littered with bodies, both living and dead, the dead in varying states of decay, some hollowed out by vultures. Being operated on saw the scalpel turned on me and the fallow period spent lying on a hospital bed led me to more contemplation on the cycle of birth/life/death. In the Serengeti it couldn’t have been more clearly visualised; Wildebeest crossing the river and feeding the crocodiles, vultures sitting in wait watching injured animals on their last legs. In hospital they at least try to cure you but, failing that, they have a pragmatic approach to your death, harvesting your organs for the next patient. My new work is all about the host/parasite relationship, illustrated in perverse or unusual ways; piglets suckling on a dead tree, sap running down their chins as though they have drained it of life. Phallic mushrooms spring from dead bodies and are eaten by birds.

LC: I read recently that because you studied English not art, you felt like something of an impostor in the art world, as if you "fell into this role by accident" and you were uncomfortable with the title of "artist". Is that something that’s finally faded now that you have carved your mark ( bad pun intended!) in the world of British art and you are a highly valued, collectable artist world wide?

PM: Yes, this was just something I felt in the beginning as it all came upon me rather suddenly and with no planning. I felt guilty and unprepared as I knew many people who had spent years studying art and honing their ideas and it seemed ridiculous that I was given all this attention without even asking for it. I do feel a responsibility to improve my own art education as I go and to never get complacent and churn out the same stuff endlessly. I push myself further with every show and it’s only now I’m starting to feel I’ve earned my place in the art world.

LC: You are in a relationship with fellow artist Mat Collishaw. I’m sure I’m not the first to wish for some kind of collaborative macabre epic magnum opus! Is it something we could hope for in the future?

PM: We help each other out a lot with work when it comes to discussing ideas/presentation etc but prefer to work independently to each other. However, we have had an idea for a joint project that could be quite spectacular... if only we could find the time!